


Piety and Habit

by pokey_jr



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Addiction, Cunnilingus, F/M, Solas is Fen'Harel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-10
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2018-04-20 01:58:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4769291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pokey_jr/pseuds/pokey_jr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lavellan has trouble dealing with the stress of everything that comes with her title, plus her hand hurts.  Solas tries to help her find relief.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Piety and Habit

The heavens turned over Skyhold in late autumn. Darker skies dropped brighter stars in mobiles, points of light just out of reach if one was to stand on the balcony of the highest tower. This brought the nobles of Orlais and Ferelden out of the great main hall long enough to admire natural beauty, commenting poetically for each others' sake. They sipped on the last of the summer wine and returned inside in a rustle of silk brocade. The leaves from the trees deserted first, cracked from cold. Then the nobles would follow.

Now, they stayed. They wove conversation from rumors. Now, a minstrel struck a tune, a lilting melody to a sinuous beat. Impossible to dance in such a crowded, ancient place, yet the music cleaved to their hearts and twined around their feet. Privilege, exclusive to enjoy and lament, far from their homes in this summering fortress. 

Fen’Harel listened and catalogued the petty events of their lives. The affairs, the scandals, heartbreak and blackmail. Some of them even considered him a trusted advisor, the elven apostate-turned-humble-painter. They thought he slept on the couch in the rotunda, and they passed him their hushed secrets over the wooden desk strewn with brushes, his research notes, and some strange shards of blue crystal and bone. He waited in the high-backed chair and sipped the vile tea. Once, the Iron Bull had interrupted this meditation and imbibed some of the tea. Apparently it tasted like Qunari fermented fish. He wrinkled his nose and drew upon a reserve of calm to finish it promptly.

The interruption came down the spiral stairs this time, bounding to his desk. She slapped her palms on its surface, scattering a few papers. "Solas, would you mind? The potion?" His Inquisitor. The points of her ears were chafed from the ridiculous helmet she insisted on wearing. The same helmet had also sunburned an odd pattern onto the pale skin of her face.

He sighed. “Of course.”

***

He stalked after her through the crowd, following her as a wolf shadows an elk through reeds. And up the four flights of stairs turning up the tower to her chambers, he observed the swing of her hips, as he always did, and hungered. He tried to imagine her with her clan, with the eyes of one of her young lovers. An ignorant boy. Would he see her naivete? Her temperance? The curved line from her back to her neck. Fen'Harel would bite her there as no other lover would, his jaws pressuring the airway and arteries just enough to start her panic. She was beautiful, but more human than elf. There remained none in this age like the females he had taken at the height of Arlathan. They had been ethereal, aloof, skittish as halla but too stupid to realize the predator among them, and they bucked beneath him so wildly. 

He sealed the door to her quarters after them with a spell, one she had not noticed in the previous visits. Lavellan sat at her desk for her habit, this tonic he brewed to ease the pain in her hand from the Anchor. She said it tasted like embrium wine mixed with cherry cordial. She sat in expectation, brown eyes trusting his delivery. Brown eyes were not Elvhen; that was human influence. Even as they sequestered themselves, the Dalish were still affected by the blight of human expansion. He was forced to remind himself of this every time she smiled. He suspected she was addicted to the concoction, and that the pain from the Anchor, perhaps only a twinge at first, was long gone. There was no embrium in the mixture, and only a dash of powdered cherry tree bark. Toasted Black Lotus pods were said to have the spicy-sweet aroma of embrium when cooked at the right temperature over a fire of wet evergreen branches. The woodsmoke permeated his clothes now. Josephine had complimented him on his new perfume.

She still needed the flask he brought every week. Fen'Harel watched her ritual. There was a vial of the essence of Crystal Grace in the topmost right drawer in her desk. This, she unstoppered and dabbed once on each of her collarbones and in the hollow of her neck. The wolf wanted to nuzzle, to gnaw and rut. He nodded, benign and placid. The flask was placed centered on the desk. The liquid in it was a deep burgundy, the color of shadow in a Chantry cloister nave, and the glass reflected a nimbus of light around it onto the wood grain of the desk. 

He wondered if she still enjoyed the taste when she drank it. Once, she savored it by the sip, said it deserved to be bottled as a vintage of Skyhold, though he refused to taste it with her. Now she tilted everything back, her head, her chair, the flask, and he moved swiftly to catch her before she hit the bookshelves behind her. They waited for the numbness to reach her eyes. Fen'Harel lifted her pliant body, bringing along the gossamer scent of Crystal Grace. It was too delicate for her. She bounded across the Dales and smelled like wet grass and halla, trudged through Crestwood and the Fallow Mire knee deep in mud, reeking and sodden and laughing about it. The Elves of Arlathan had worn Crystal Grace to give themselves wings, envisioned themselves as aspects of their gods. 

"Solas." The Inquisitor gave a bleary smile. Her head lolled back when he set her on the four poster bed. This was where he might leave after tucking her under the blankets and furs. But she always asked him for a story, one of his tales from his wanderings in the Fade. He indulged himself.

“I have seen during my wanderings in the Fade…” At this refrain she closed her eyes. “A single warrior in a field of stars, far beyond our world, marching outward. He clutched his sword, he was alone.” She had once told him she liked his accent, that it was like hearing an air on a lute at a garden party. This description traveled; his unique accent, thousands of years out of style, had become a trend among Skyhold’s noble guests, until pet Nug dyeing had taken its place. 

“He searched for his sister and brothers, a maiden, a mage, an elder, a mystic. Yet he found emptiness, a deep silence. And loneliness. He kept forward for ages. He shouted that he was looking for an end, but he could not accept that claustrophobic fear of dying alone.” Fen’Harel poured his voice out for her like an anointment. She lifted her chin suppliant, her submission to him. He soothed her. A hand on the slim white neck to trace its cords from bone to hollow. 

“Who would tell him to turn around? His siblings hung in array behind him, yet he never looked back. 

“He reached the towering figure at the edge of the field, the end of the empty quarter, but the giant would not let him peer beyond, for what can exist outside of emptiness?” Fen’Harel drew a breath. “This giant was a gatekeeper, though I could not discern from which era or which empire. As I watched this tale unfold I wished I could ask questions, but I was relegated to observe.” Frustration on his breath, and the bitterness of the wine he sipped from the goblet on the nightstand.

“Those secrets were not for him to know, nor I, unless the giant’s terms were accepted. While I watched, the warrior set down his sword and talked at length, at times with himself, at times with the guardian. I cannot recall his ramblings now, but I believe they were mostly regrets. As he admitted each one, he stripped a piece of his armor. A gauntlet, a vambrace, the gorget, down to the faulds… he might have been playing Wicked Grace and run out of coin.”

She giggled at this so he silenced her mirth, a motion of his hand over her breast. He liked the catch in her breath, like a claw snagging a thread of lace. There was uncertainty in her eyes. It quickened his pulse. He flicked open the lower clasps of her blouse, always waiting for her to say something to stop him. His fingers traced the curve of her breast, one by one on the soft skin. The contrasts he saw in her were beautiful. Her small hands held calluses from days of desperate fighting. Iron Bull had barely as many and liked to scrape at them with his knife in between rounds-- at the tavern or the brawling pits. 

“What happened to the warrior?”

“He passed to nothing.” He had seen her twist and dive to dodge enemy mages’ projectiles. Where others moved gracefully to safety, she landed face-first in the dirt, only to hamstring an unwary foe with a hidden dagger. Yet presently, under his hands, she arched like a dancer. This was an offering and he bent down to accept it, to lick at the bare expanse, and then over to one breast. He was rough, his teeth touched flesh. He could not say he knew no other way, but she was not permitted to have the truth.

She moaned. “And the siblings?” 

"I do not know." Her arousal thrummed in rhythm with the elevation of her pulse, though she stilled beneath him, unstirring but not stoic. That was the potion’s effect. It curled around her senses and unwound her pleasure, so he pursued it in a single line down her form. At her stomach he paused. Another contrast. The surface curved over tense muscle. He wondered what she would look like without such an active life. Likely she would bear little Dalish children. Did she want to? He shifted and threw off the blankets.

“Solas…” She often protested the cold, even as he reminded her the disparate temperatures enhanced sensations.

Fen’Harel was silent. He lifted her hips and tugged down her leggings to mid-thigh. This salacious state of undress was enough. Nearly enough. It tempted him painfully. Her nipples peaked at the selvage of the blouse, the white fallow field of her stomach and hips curved round a dark triangle. He was patient. He moved fully onto the bed to fold her legs up to the side, still pinned in the fabric. The smell of her cunt made him eager and he grasped the softness of her thighs. This keenness was a foolish sentiment. It drew his mouth down to the final objective. The scent was overwhelming so he lapped it from her lips. She whimpered but did not struggle. His tongue stroked up, flickered. Her breaths came in quiet strums in tune with his motions. At some point he had to strip the trousers from her legs, which she opened for him, for anything. She was wanton and pacific, still a contrast. Her fists gripped the sheets resolutely while two of his fingers and his silver tongue demanded her joy and adoration.

In her pleasure the Inquisitor called for Pride again. He held her arching hips down with one hand and imagined thrusting his cock in her mouth. Her lips stretched around his girth and she gagged on his length. Her eyes cast upwards in gratitude. Yielding, contrite. His only worshiper. He praised her with soft words and stroked her dark hair. Her satisfaction subsided, so he could abandon his fantasy. Perhaps next time. 

Fen’Harel withdrew, taking the flask. Later, a servant would find her here, half indecent and disoriented. The painter would hear the shouting from his place in the rotunda: a war council has been called! Where is the Inquisitor?! She would not remember him. He delivered the empty flask to his desk, then completed the last of the rites, making for his small chamber overlooking the garden. Here he brought his unspent tension every week. He licked his lips and tasted her essence, a surplus that hastened his pace. He bowed his head, forearm against the cold stone, took his cock half hard since he had abandoned her. A moment later he gasped his shameful release, a final motion to surge and spill in his hand.

The sky was dark. Stifled voices from the garden. Tomorrow morning when it was cold and quiet again he would collect more pods from the Black Lotus, and dew from the Crystal Grace.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a few days before Trespasser came out. Even with the revelations at the end (*sob*) I still think this could fit in well as a behind the scenes snapshot. Apologies for any errors grammatical or factual, my husband is the only one who has read this so far.


End file.
